string v.s. basic_string

[George2]

Hello everyone,
I would like to learn some experiences about when should we use
std::basic_string and when should we use std::string?

I learned some Hello World level samples and now want to listen to
your practical experiences. :-)
thanks in advance,
George

[Victor Bazarov]

George2 wrote:

I would like to learn some experiences about when should we use
std::basic_string and when should we use std::string?

I learned some Hello World level samples and now want to listen to
your practical experiences. :-)

I almost never had to use 'basic_string'. 'std::string' is a typedef
for 'std::basic_string<char ...>' (where ... represents some stuff
related to 'char'). If you deal with 'char', 'std::string' is enough.
If you deal with wide char ('wchar_t'), 'std::wstring' is the class.
I heard that Unicode is never well served by either of those, so folks
have their own custom classes for Unicode, I guess.

An example when I did have to use 'std::basic_string' is the library
where some functions were specialised for 'char' and 'wchar_t' (they
had to do that to use some non-overloaded functions) and just for the
completion's sake, I added a specialisation for 'unsigned char' and
'signed char' (since those are different from 'char'), and utilised
some casts internally.

V
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Please remove capital 'A's when replying by e-mail
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[Massimo]

George2 wrote:

Hello everyone,
I would like to learn some experiences about when should we use
std::basic_string and when should we use std::string?

I learned some Hello World level samples and now want to listen to
your practical experiences. :-)
thanks in advance,
George

In most cases, we use std::string. I've never used std::basic_string.

[Johannes Bauer]

Victor Bazarov schrieb:

I heard that Unicode is never well served by either of those, so folks
have their own custom classes for Unicode, I guess.

Is anything planned for the future of C++?

Handling UTF-8 *correctly* is awkwardly difficult, especially since
different characters (not in the C sense of the word) may differ greatly
in length, depending on the type of character.

Some std::utf8string would be really nice.

Greetings,
Johannes

--
"Viele der Theorien der Mathematiker sind falsch und klar
Gotteslästerlich. Ich vermute, dass diese falschen Theorien genau
deshalb so geliebt werden." -- Prophet und Visionär Hans Joss aka
HJP in de.sci.mathematik <47**********************@news.sunrise.ch>

[James Kanze]

On Nov 20, 6:26 pm, Johannes Bauer <[e-mail]:

Victor Bazarov schrieb:

I heard that Unicode is never well served by either of
those, so folks have their own custom classes for Unicode, I
guess.

Is anything planned for the future of C++?

There will be new types, guaranteed to be UTF-16 and UTF-32.

Handling UTF-8 *correctly* is awkwardly difficult, especially
since different characters (not in the C sense of the word)
may differ greatly in length, depending on the type of
character.

That seems to be a widespread myth. In my experience, it's
rarely a problem. And the same thing is true for UTF-16, and
even UTF-32.

--
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[Cholo Lennon]

On Nov 20, 12:59 pm, George2 <[e-mail]:

Hello everyone,

I would like to learn some experiences about when should we use
std::basic_string and when should we use std::string?

I learned some Hello World level samples and now want to listen to
your practical experiences. :-)

In general, like Victor said, you have never need to use basic_string
directly. BTW, like guys of microsoft VC newsgroup told you, at least
in Windows world is a common practice to use basic_string with TCHAR
to maintain backward compatibility with older versions of Windows that
don't support unicode strings.
Regards

--
Cholo Lennon
Bs.As.
ARG